Crossmakers

For Lent, I’m reading a wonderful devotional titled Bread and Wine, and in it is a sobering quote that’s again too long to tweet — but too good to pass up. It comes from American Episcopal Priest Morton T. Kelsey:

Then there was the nameless carpenter who made the cross. He was a skilled workman. He knew full well what the purpose of that cross was. If you questioned him he probably would have said: “But I am a poor man who must make a living. If other men use it for ill, is it my fault?” So say all of us who pursue jobs which add nothing to human welfare or which hurt some people. Does the work I do aid or hinder human beings? Are we crossmakers for our modern world? There are many, many of them.

It’s a tough call, because the ones who’ll have to make the toughest decisions are the poor. But the reason I like this quote is that we Americans rarely think about the output of what we do — and take that into account when we receive a paycheck.

Another road marker that “He who began a new work in you (us), will finish it.” The next Passover will be a “Passup” and as Paul so delicately puts it it will began with a “shout” and then “so shall we be ever be with the Lord.” But until then every “cross maker” will have an opportunity to change his own world.